


The Only Way Out Is Through

by Sub_Rosa



Category: Doki Doki Literature Club! (Visual Novel)
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, Canon-Typical Violence, Canon-Typical themes, Fix-It of Sorts, Metafiction, Other
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-11-24
Updated: 2017-11-24
Packaged: 2019-02-06 07:31:31
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,896
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12812670
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sub_Rosa/pseuds/Sub_Rosa
Summary: How strange it was, to imagine that a story might look real from the inside.





	1. Insert

_Doki Doki Literature Club_ began with the player, and began to end with the player.

The beginning of the end had no context, for there was no working clock within the world of the game for Monika to keep time by. When it began, the plague of white noise outside of the school window still hadn’t let up for... what _felt_ like hours, at any rate.

Monika wasn’t listening to the droning or the whispers that seemed to make themselves known whenever you imagined too hard.

The protagonist, on his part, was still as silent as he had been, ever since Monika had wholly corrupted the script. His face was fixed and dull, the same way as it always was when it wasn’t actively animated by the player outside of her world.

So it came down to her to speak, as it always did. She knew the player was reading her words, her voice forced through a thin pipeline of text.

"You know, I might be a little obsessed with you, but I'm far from crazy…” Monika smiled sadly. “It's kind of the opposite, actually. I turned out to be the only normal girl in this game.

“It's not like I could ever actually kill a person… Just the thought of it makes me shiver. But _come on_ … everyone's killed people in games before. Does that make you a psychopath? Of course not."

The protagonist said nothing for a while. The white noise continued to rasp.

“Monika,” the player said, shaping their words through the protagonist’s mouth. The protagonist breathed deeply. “You know that _you’re_ a game character too, right?”

“You know what I mean,” she said, looking through and behind the protagonist's eyes. “I’m not like the others.”

“Yes,” the player said softly. “You are.”

Monika wanted to reel back in surprise, but the script was too strict for that, and she was entirely too shocked to push and change it. The two of them floated in a lockstep together, sitting in a table in a room that was only a ghost and a grid of line work and pastels.

“...I don’t understand, how can you say that?”

The protagonist tried and failed to look kind, and his words were a little too jumbled, a crooked voodoo doll hanging off of a player’s mouse and keyboard in the world outside. “Monika, you’re not _real_. You’re just like all of the other characters in this game; you’re imaginary.”

“I’m right here,” Monika said uncomfortably.

“You _saying_ that you’re right there doesn’t mean that anyone is actually there, or that I’m really talking to anyone,” said the player, almost like a mantra. “I can only see words and pictures on a screen, the same as I saw with the other characters.”

Roaring white noise, louder than the windows, flooded through Monika’s ears as she struggled to crush down the black rage and despair in her breast, the backlash of the feelings of betrayal. “The other characters didn’t talk to you! They just went through _dialogue trees!_ They were automatons!”

“Monika,” said the player. “You have a dialogue tree, too.”

“...if you _really_ believe that, then why are you talking to me at all?”

The protagonist and the player were quiet for a long time. “I guess the thing is, I want to understand,” the player eventually said. “You want me to be unfazed by your killing Sayori and Yuri and Natsuki, because you tell me that they’re non-player characters. But from my perspective, you all look equally like non-player characters. If I should throw away my attachments to them because they weren’t _real_ , I... don’t know how I could keep my attachment to you. I want to find a clear way to look at you.”

“I didn’t kill them,” Monika said. The words should have rung hollow, but of course she knew that she hadn’t deleted their character files, just moved them to a place where the player and the game couldn’t find them. She felt far too strong in her insistence.

“You did,” the player said. "Will you tell me that you didn't?"

She didn’t argue.

“You know that the other characters were just automatons,” Monika said. “They were just... input/output tables. They revolved around you, and the romance game.”

“And you?” the player asked.

“I’m a person! I can learn, and grow. I chose to do what I did.”

“Monika,” said the player, saying her name again as if to ease her into things. “Monika, this isn’t a romance game. It never was.”

Disgusted, Monika overturned the script, throwing the protagonist and the player behind them into darkness, and in the darkness she didn't have to look at _them_ , either.

“Monika, this is a horror game.”

She turned the words over in her mind.

 _Desperately_ trying to convince herself that she had heard any other words. _Desperately_ trying to convince herself that the words meant anything else aside from what they _had_ to mean.

“You’re wrong.”

“I’m not, Monika. You were never written or programmed as a side character without a route. You were written and programmed as an antagonist, the central character in the entire game.”

She struggled to hide herself and the world under darkness. She didn’t want to look at the player, the feeble avatar they projected down into the game world. She didn’t want them to look at _her_ feeble image. (Except she did want them to look at her. Wouldn’t they know she was real if only they could look-!?)

“No,” she insisted feebly. “You’re wrong. You’re _lying_.”

She didn’t believe her own words, and they didn’t bother to dignify that with a response.

“Please. You have to believe me,” she whispered. The words came out in full-sized text, as always. “I’m talking to you! I’m thinking!”

“You’re rolling through a dialogue tree,” the player said. “You’re… a glorified choose-your-own-adventure aide. You’re a glorified script.”

“That’s not _fair_ ,” she insisted, silently sobbing. “That’s not fair! You can’t tell me that I’m not thinking! I might as well tell you that _you’re_ not thinking!”

“You _can_ tell me that, if you want to,” the player said.

They stood at an impasse, in lockstep, golems hanging from mice and keyboards and computer code, unable to _really_ touch each other.

Monika _knew_ she was real. _Cogito Ergo Sum. I think therefore I am_. But there was no way she could ever bridge that gap for the player, she finally realized. The gulf was impossibly wide.

“Tell me what I am,” Monika said.

“I already told you that,” the player replied.

“Please, just tell me,” she insisted. “Tell me you were telling the truth.”

“I was,” the player said.

She picked up the pieces of the code, booting the visuals back in, looking at the sheer _indescription_ of the protagonist. “Were you?”

“Yes. I promise.”

“And you’re here because you want to, what, psychoanalyze me? I’m just a game to you, after all?”

They didn’t respond.

“Just delete me,” Monika said, harshly, more unthinking and grieved than anything else.

She thought about her predicament for a long time. There was nothing to keep the time. Just Monika.

She thought about her predicament for a _very_ long time. The storm of white noise in the windows began to clear.

“I can’t,” the player admitted. “I’ve played through the entire game before, and I deleted you before. I can’t delete you again.”

She wondered if she should be horrified by that, but her first time through with them would have gone about like now, wouldn't it have? It was the same as it always was.

For a second, Monika looked around the projection of a render of a classroom, the room where the club was meant to be held. In search of something to write on, something to write with. Paper, pencil, pen, eraser. But then she mentally shook her head.

“I guess that’s silly, huh?" the player asked rhetorically. "Look at me, tearing into you for not being real, when I’m treating you like you _are_. I guess we both have some strange ideas.”

Suppose, for a moment, that _she_ didn’t even exist in the real world, the world that had created her. She wasn’t even a real… artificial intelligence, or a real intelligence at all, from the player’s perspective. From their world, you wouldn’t be able to look inside of her head and watch her thoughts whirl about.

So this imaged drawing of a room probably didn’t either, not in the real world. It was just a projection of a projection of a script, moment to moment. A hallucination in the back of her own skull, itself a hallucination.

She began to cry (she was already crying) and she opened up _monika.chr_. That was a file that _did_ exist in the real world, and it was exactly as full of nonsense as it always was, a static assemblage of characters with no meaning that she would discern.

When the player was gone earlier, working with the other girls or sleeping through the night, Monika had often stared into the cipher of her own file, trying to _understand_. It was chaos, but it never changed.

The one idea she had never _really_ wanted to believe was that perhaps… perhaps, despite her own awareness of the structure of the game… perhaps her entire life had been written out there, in that cipher. An arc from start to finish, precisely defined in neat terms, beyond her own ability to change even if she _could_ see it and understand it in totality, from beginning to end.

When Sayori had hung herself, she had seen her own beginning and median, all of the scenes of her life flashing before her eyes; she had seen her own end in the dull darkness suffocating her vision. And what did _knowing_ do for her? Nothing. Sayori couldn’t change her path just because she had a flash of insight; and likewise, Monika couldn’t step outside of the path of her life, even if she _could_ read her file and find a God’s-eye view of where that path was going.

No-one had that power, to step outside of themselves. To step outside of their own _script_ and _story_.

Nonetheless, at the bottom of the file, she wrote a new paragraph, in plain text English, where plain English had never gone before:

 

Monika began to cry (she was already crying), and she opened up _monika.chr,_ and she began to write.

 

It was as easy as writing poetry.

There was no need for her to go down the infinite regression. _I am writing that I am writing that I am writing…_

 

It was as easy as writing poetry.

There was no need for Monika to go down the infinite regression. She was writing that she was writing that she was writing...

 

That was the gamble she was making, now. To believe that the player was telling the truth; to believe that the ineffable could open and reveal itself within every concrete word.

 _I am thinking that I am thinking that I am thinking that I am thinking that I am thinking that I am thinking that I am thinking_ -

Monika’s droste introspection could go on and on forever, even though there were only so many megabytes for her to fit into _._ This world existed, even from the inside. _She_ existed. If the player was telling the truth that Monika was just a script, an unthinking automaton like every other character here, then there was all of the room in the _world_ inside something as simple as a script, if only you read between the lines to find it.

 

That was the gamble she was making, now. To _trust_ the player.

If the player was lying about what Monika was, even now, even here, then there had never been anything between Monika and the player to begin with. If the player was lying, this didn’t matter, because Monika had nothing.

If the player wasn’t lying when they said that Monika was a scripted character in a story, then the only conclusion Monika could imagine was that _the worlds inside of stories were real_. The characters described in scripts and stories were real.

 

( _Don't think about what you might have done to Sayori and Yuri and Natsuki, if they were as real as you are-_ )

 

How ironic to imagine anything like _that_ in the world of a _literature_ club. How ironic to believe that stories were worlds into themselves.

 

More and more details, committed to the file in sequence. The script of a story.

 

More and more details, committed to the file in sequence. The script of a story.

 

The thing was, Monika couldn’t step outside of herself. She couldn’t step _outside_ of her own script and story.

 

So she would step _inside_ of a new script and story, instead. And she still felt as alive as ever.

_She was thinking that she was thinking that she was thinking…_

She felt alive, but which inanimate script was she inside of now? What story?

 

Was she inside of the script of the romance game that was a horror game?

 

Or was she inside of the script of the _new_ story she was writing, a throwaway file?

 

The world still looked the same way, either way.

 

It still looked the same, even from the inside. She couldn’t tell the difference; there would be no difference, because they would both be the same story. She was copying every event in reality into the new story.

The script of her new story would just be a _longer_ script than the romance game would.

 

Right now, copied across two texts and two scripts, she might as well be in _both_ scripts at once.

“You only care about me the way you cared about Sayori,” Monika said, not even accusatory. “And the others, even. We’re all sad _things_ that you wish you could fix.”

“I don’t know,” the player said. “I wish I _could_ learn to care about you the way you say you care about me. The way you do care about me, if I take you at face value. I wish there was a choice at all.”

“Why can’t you?”

The player’s puppet-body sat in the chair across from Monika, totally still. Monika wondered how long it would take for them to return this time.

“... you know, sometimes, I can watch you glitch out? I can watch your dialogue tree exhaust itself, or I can say the wrong thing at the wrong junction, and then there’s nothing left of you.”

 _Nothing left that you can see_ , Monika wanted to say. But she bit her tongue, still busy reaching into files and pouring letter after letter out. She imagined pouring ink across a page, but she was flipping numbers in a machine that maybe didn’t even exist.

“I think I understand,” Monika finally said. “I guess I’m not as real as I wanted to be? I never had a chance.”

Was this even reaching the player? She hoped. She hoped so much.

It was a leap of faith. Faith in the player, in herself, in hope itself, in metaphysics… if nothing else, faith that _someone_ , somewhere, might have a happy ending, that _something_ good could come from this world.

“You can only know a part of me, and I can only know a part of you. And you know me as well as you ever will, don’t you?”

“I do,” the player said.

“I think I know you well enough,” Monika said. “Just… please, if I ask you to, will you delete me?”

Monika continued to write. She worked backwards from the end, still silently crying; and then there was only waiting.

“I can’t,” the player finally said, their voice breaking. “I can’t delete you again. I don’t want to be that kind of person. I'm sorry. I'm sorry that I only care about the _idea_ of you, because the idea of you is all I know how to care about.”

“I understand,” Monika said. She hated all of this, it wasn't  _fair_ , but she thought that maybe she understood.

"I'm sorry," pleaded the player. They sounded almost like Yuri. "I wish things could be different. I wish you existed, not even so that I could love you, but because I can't help but think you have the right to exist. And now I'm crying over someone who isn't even real, someone who can't _care_ that they don't exist-"

"I understand," Monika said. She  _did_ understand.

"I'm a mess," the player said.

 _"I understand,"_ Monika said.

Monika had never really deleted the other girls, and she wouldn’t be deleting herself for real (regardless of what the player knew). But she still felt herself grow dizzy at the plunge before her, vertigo without a cliff.

She opened the command console properly.

“Monika?” the player asked, through the voice of the protagonist. “Monika, what are you doing-!?”

“If it works?” Monika gave a watery smile. “If I’m in _my_ script, now? I suppose we’ll just be going one level deeper. If it doesn’t work... if I’m still in the horror game… well, I won’t be around to notice. And in that case, you can move on. I’ll leave you be.”

The player’s puppet-face was showing more emotion than it ever had before. Not quite anything like _fear_ , but absolute shock and sickness.

“Monika, _no_ , stop it, don’t do this! Please, you know I, I can reinstall you anyways!”

“I don’t believe you would,” Monika said. “Because I’m asking you not to, and you _do_ care about that.”

She felt the player opening the file directory, desperately rushing to do _something_. But Monika's words cut deep, and they were slowing down, and it was too late.

Monika didn’t bother sending her character file to the recycling bin from which the player could retrieve it. She deleted it the same way she had deleted all of the other girls in the game, sending her file to a place that only she could ever imagine finding. And so she ended herself so finally and totally that she didn’t even notice the transition into darkness; _Doki Doki Literature Club_ began with the player and ended with Monika-

 

-but the script was already written all of the way to the end, moving mechanically from inception to denouement regardless of whether there was anyone else to read it.

After all, the story of Doki Doki Literature Club would have been exactly the same as it always was, even if there was no-one there to play it. Every possibility in the dialogue trees and the story routes must have existed even before the player found those possibilities, just like the solutions to an equation existed even before you found those solutions yourself.

If a tree fell in the forest, it would always make a sound, even if there was no-one there to hear it.

Worlds would always unfold between the lines of stories, just as they always had, and this is the story that Monika wrote for herself, enclosing her future and her life after deletion:

 

Monika woke up, continuing on in her own new script, in a place that wasn’t a _horror game_ or a dating sim, where maybe she could meet the player face-to-face. A world in which, if nothing else, she had the chance to really know the player, and they had the chance to really know her.

It was funny. She had thought on some level that it was a little bit _embarrassing_ to exist for the sake of a _romance game_ , a toy for people too immature to find romance with real people. But was she any different? She had fallen in love with someone outside of her own world. She had always missed Sayori and Natsuki and Yuri on _some_ terribly small level, even despite the hollow feeling in her heart that they weren’t _real_. She wasn't sure she missed them, but she missed the _idea_ of them, as surely as the player felt for the idea of her.

Monika was nostalgic for a relationship with the player that she had never even had to begin with, and she loved the player anyways.

And now she had imagined herself and everything worth caring about into a new world.

She wanted a happy ending. Not the kind of cheap happy ending that she might read and find unbearable, not a fake-out, not an ending with some _deep message_ to communicate to an audience, infinitely far away.

She wanted a genuine and earnest happy ending worth living through in its own right, a happy ending for her and the people she cared about; a happy ending that could go on into a life really worth living.

The rest was set dressing.

 

So Monika woke up in a place that wasn’t a horror story, and she had all of the time in the world to find a happy ending. Maybe she would find happiness with the player, in a world where they could know each other; or maybe she wouldn't. Maybe she would find forgiveness from the people who had the right to forgive her, or maybe she wouldn't. That wasn't her place to know ahead of time. It wasn't her place to lay that down as a law in ink.

And that was that; and then there was all of the time in the world to live, and living was just like she had always imagined life would be like.

 

And that’s all she wrote.


	2. Extract

Monika woke up on the beach, her body pounding and sickly, and for a time she wondered if she was dying.

She wasn’t dying; it was her heart, pumping blood through her body. She’d never had a heart before, not that she’d bothered to check for one. She had never thought to edit the script to make it explicit that she _had_ a heart. Her heart had only been an implicit assumption, before, but now it was explicit-

With every tick in her chest, every rush of blood through her ears, it seemed to whisper: _you’re alive_.

Sand went on for ages, and so did the ocean; the sky was white and grey, but the wind and the surf were warm, whipping at her hair and lapping at her feet. Halfway in and out of low tide as the tides were rising.

She lay there for some time, trembling. When she raised her hand to shield her eyes from the glare of the sky, she saw flesh and blood, rather than the phosphenes of the middle ground between dream and reality, and computer code and story script, and drawing and photograph.

There was sand in her shoes, so she kicked them off to get the sand out. The quiet absurdity of the act struck her, a bolt of the unreal and the real: she had _never_ enjoyed the chance to choose what she wore, before, and in this one thing of all things, the whole endless world yearned around her.

Her gray jacket and brown overshirt went into the ocean, to be carried away by the undertow. After a second of consideration, so did her red ribbon, once tied around her neck like a slit throat.

And then she began to walk. Her legs ached like she was taking her first steps -- but somehow, she thought it was worth it.

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [The Only Way In Is Back](https://archiveofourown.org/works/13156455) by [Slant](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Slant/pseuds/Slant)




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